Reply to It is Native American heritage month. What stolen land do you live on?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This thread has taken an odd derail. I’m not sure why PP is so fired up about learning some history, specifically that Jesus was a Jew. What does that have to do with Native American land acknowledgement? [/quote]

I am one of the de-railers… my answer is because this side topic is more interesting than the main topic.

Land acknowledgments are patronizing, silly, pointless, virtue-signaling, empty, meaningless, etc.  But speaking of history, my (admittedly limited) understanding is that many Native tribes didn’t even adhere to the concept of land ownership.  It’s just land, you live on it sometimes and utilize the resources when you can, but no one “owns” it.[/quote]

There were hundreds of tribes who probably had hundreds of conceptions of ownership. Some did see land as communal owned, rather than owned by individuals. That said, there's nothing about a typical land acknowledgement that requires a legal concept of ownership to make sense. Typically they're written something like "[Institution] acknowledges that the land on which we sit was, and is still, inhabited and cared for by the Susquehannock tribe, and Piscataway Peoples" or "We stand on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank and the Piscataway People." They're about who inhabits the land, not who owns it in a legal sense.

I also don't really see it as my place to decide if a gesture meant for another person is patronizing or silly. I know Indians who like them (including a local Piscataway who is quite happy to see his tribe get more notice) and I know Indians who think they're ridiculous. In that context, I'm neither going to demand them or denounce them. [/quote]

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